1. Presentation:
As a kid I shared a room with my sibling who had monopoly over it, and whose untypical sense for the interior design resulted in walls covered with posters, not of the superstars but real stars, galaxies, and nebulas. We both spent countless hours staring at those walls that transfigured into the infinite unknown worlds, and we both wondered the exact same questions “What in the world is all of this around us?” We both pursued this question and while my sibling’s life is devoted to physics, while mine to art. In the lab full of metal and liquid helium, my sibling sets up experiments to test the question and confirm the answers, while I, in a studio filled with carbon (pencils) and paper, set up an Art process to experience the questions and understand the answers. Both Art and Science question the world; they bring new thoughts to the world, and re-contextualize preconceived ideas and views.
To illustrate this I will read the following quote by Carlo Rovelli.
“[Artistic] thinking explores and redraws the world, gradually offering us better and better images of it, teaching us to think in ever more effective ways. [Art] is a continual exploration of ways of thinking. Its strength is its visionary capacity to demolish preconceived ideas, to reveal new regions of reality, and to construct new and more effective images of the world. This adventure rests upon the entirety of past knowledge, but at its heart is change.”
Carlo Rovelli being the theoretical physicist did not talk about Art but science, I just replaced the word science with Art. We can see that the same statement is the most accurate definition of both disciplines.
Erwin Schrodinger writes in What is Life? that we have inherited, throughout centuries, the unified, universal, all-embracing knowledge, which is the only one with full credit, however, the depth of knowledge has forced us to branch into specialized limited and narrow focus. Perhaps we should have more comprehensive view of Reality.
Patrick Cavanagh, a co-founded the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard, and leader in research in visual neuroscience and perception, recognizes that Art is a 40,000-year record of experiments in visual neuroscience that reveals as much about the human brain as it reveals about the world around.
Roberto Zenith, researcher in fluid dynamics and Professor of Engineering at Brown University, have extensively studied David A. Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock’s painting process realizing similarities between the paint technique to flow phenomena in other areas, which have helped explain formation of lava domes on Venus, and the Great Kavir salt desert in Iran.
Type of Art that best encompasses these ideas of all-embracing knowledge is, what I call Information Realism. IR is art that through its processes, through the relations between informational units most accurately captures information from Reality, detached from artist’s beliefs, opinions, and expressions, but captures information from Reality verbatim.
Artist, just like scientists with the experiment, sets up an art process that allows a phenomenon to be documented by the phenomenon itself.
Examples of Information Realism:
El Castillo cave in Spain contains handprints about 40,000 years old. We have direct information of the person’s physicality and actions who 40,000 years ago was present in the cave. The information of their existence at the moment, in the moment, is permanently preserved. This is one of the very first IR.
Similarly, Roman Ondák’s Measuring the Universe begins with an empty gallery space. Gallery attendants mark, with a marker, height, name and date of each visitor who enters the space. Every name, even if invisible, has permanently defined the current state of the space while existing within the space only for a brief moment, just like the cave handprints. Randomness of the individual height marks has over time accumulated into a wave pattern.
Dada, a nonsensical, art movement, developed in reaction to World War I, in 1916, in Zürich, Switzerland. In the time of WW1 the entire world was using the most rational reasons, according to them, for justifying behaviors that were the most irrational and ill conceived. The world made no sense and the most realistic representation would be nonsensical art and irrationality,
Interestingly enough, around the same time Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrödinger, to name only a few of the great thinkers, were working on Quantum theory. Quantum Theory, like DADA, at the same time period, seemed not to make sense at first and required a high level of abstract thinking, knowledge, and intellect in order to be understood.
Cornelia Parker’s works are literal objects, and their remains, that have undergone a dramatic event of a destruction, making them a documentation of an event frozen in time.
Charles Ross’s consists of burned wooden planks by concentrating sunlight with a lens. It took 8 minutes and 33 seconds for the photons to travel from the surface of the Sun to Earth and burn the wood. The Sun is drawing a portrait of itself. Observation of the phenomenon documented by the phenomenon itself.
Rachel Whiteread makes us aware of things-in-the-world that we experience and are part of, yet are rarely, if ever, consciously aware of. By pouring the concrete inside a building and then tearing down the walls, she makes air and even more importantly space itself, solid. Space is the main component on the micro and macro level. We would be the size of a dust particle if we were to take all the space out of us.
William Anastasi would hold a pencil, one in each hand, paper on the lap, and close eyes while taking a ride on the subway train. The movement and vibration of the train would move pencils across the paper creating the Subway Drawings. The realistic representation of the phenomenon’s information, in this case a train ride, is documented by the phenomenon itself.
Man Ray’s The Gift, 1921, The object’s intended function is reversed into its opposite. Reconstructing Reality makes us aware of Reality.
Personal IR studies:
Mark-in-time
What is time? How do I understand living through time, within time? Well, I marked every minute in a year. Paper is field with 1440 marks daily, number of minutes in 24 hours. 365 pieces of paper in total, one for each day in a year. Colored-in is the number of awake minutes daily.
Indeterminism,
After completing 100 drawings of flowers, 10 x 10 in. Each drawing is cut into 1 x 1 cm squares, totaling 40,000. Cut pieces are randomly reassembled back onto one hundred 10 x 10 in. Pieces. For 40,000 factorial is a staggering number of possible random combinations and this is one of the possible outcomes.
Would randomness create wave patterns and clumps of more and less material, would it be even, or not random at all?
What is 1,000,000? I did not understand it, so I made a million bricks.
Universe, is a mosaicked installation consisting of hundreds of the small textured liquid charcoal drawings. The invisible water that controls the textures dictates where the charcoal will be more concentrated or absent, similarly to the Dark energy and Dark matter clumping the matter within the universe.
The book of all, consists of 10,000 drawings of plants, stones, animals, and places.
The book is a collection of perceptions, of the world, of being in the world.
Currently all that is known in the Universe, everything we can account for is only about 4% of the mass and energy of the Universe. I wanted to understand how much we know we don’t know.
Book of Knowledge, consists of 1,000 pages, where 40 pages in total are filled with bit marks, around 500,000.
How much is there that we don’t know that we don’t know.
How to understand the involuntary actions within the body that keep us alive?
I drew 100,000 watercolor marks in the book, the size of the average heart, as the human heart beats about 100,000 times in a day.
Self portrait of them
Understanding myself by being aware of every day that my parents lived. Each side of the glass contains a number of marks equal to the number of days that my mom has been alive, and the other side my dad at the time of the drawings collision. 24,622 ; 26,889
1 mile drawing of self portraits, is the longest drawing in the world, unofficially.
The piece is installed on the film reels and the viewer can observe only a few feet at the time as they rewind the reels.
All portraits, thousands, ARE simultaneously in the superposition existence, that the observer collapses into one state, one impression of a character at the time, by interacting with it (turning the wheel. Our perceptual cognition has not yet evolved into complex enough consciousness to be able to comprehend the whole mile of portraits. Until that happens we must do the hard work of rewinding the reel in order to perceive.
Self Limitation, Circle, 40 hr. piece
1 line extended, 30 hr.
A continuous line is drawn for 30 incessant hours.
Through the focused durational activity self becomes an observer and observed, simultaneously; one who is experiencing and one who is observing the experiencing self. How much can one extend oneself in 30 hr.?
How do we determine the value of an Art piece?
By applying Physics and information theory, of course.
I proposed that the value of Art is simply determined by the information that it carries.
The Ancient Greeks suggested that the information content of an event depends only on how probable this event really is. Aristotle argued that the more surprised we are by an event the more information the event carries. This means that information is inversely proportional to probability, meaning events with smaller probability carry more information, and more information more value the art piece has. Let's say realistic painting of a regular cat, not Schrödinger’s, (no mystery if it is dead or alive but a nice fluffy cat) the piece is probable;
How much information does the painting contain, not much if any, because it is a cat, we all agree, and there are no other interpretations. It is certain that we all see the can, no more, so there is no value to it. It is a predictable aesthetic, without offering us new ways of seeing it. The painting is an artist’s impression of the superficial appearances of the agree upon reality, therefore.
In contrast, concrete space, exploding shed, or the iron with the nails, are unexpected pieces. They are complex pieces, containing different meaning for every viewer. The information level is high, meaning it is a high value Art.
This view I adopt from Vlatko Vedral, Professor of Quantum Information Theory at the University of Oxford, and Claude Shannon an engineer and "the father of information theory". After all, physicists and engineers are artists who are very good at math.